Series

A Shared Culture through a Shared Historical Conflict

The narrative I'm working on currently is about my generation's curiosity of conflict while growing up in a long stretch of peacetime, and not having any access to useful information to really understand the brewing of a Cold War mentality in the 80s. I grew up in the turmoil of the Late-Marcos era, and we relied on anecdotal information from films, photos, and similar sources of “entertainment”. In other words, we've recklessly created a virtual notion of war and aggression in our collective memories, which inadvertently rationalized, depersonalized, and even romanticized how we view violence. Basically, what I'm trying to do here is to reveal the nature of the fantasy, contextualize written history and "fiction" that has shaped a generation and molded who we are today.

This new series of work is about tracing back the rituality of conflict and aggression, while trying to make sense of why our world is the way it is today. My new work covers the influence of American Culture and Ideology on Filipinos through a shared history of conflict. It emphasizes the role of fiction in filmmaking that highlights the intersection of American and Asian cultures, the convergence of ideologies, and the reinforcement of Philippine-American camaraderie during World Wars I and II. Vintage war drama films such as The Walls of Hell (1964) and The Ravagers (1965) contextualize the social and cultural dimensions of history, more accurately reflecting the sentiments of the people at the time as they attempt to grasp the meaning of "the Real", much of which is missing from history textbooks and film documentaries such as the Crusade in the Pacific: MacArthur Returns to the Philippines (1951).